I used my DIY scanning electron
microscope to view a 555 timer circuit while it was powered. The circuit is a
simple oscillator with a very long time constant to make the changes easy to
see. My plan was to view the silicon die itself, and hopefully discern changes
in its internal circuitry as the oscillations occurred. As it turns out, I was
only able to "see" the charge of the electrical wires going to the
chip socket. There is likely a clear oxide layer that covers the
silicon die,
and needs to be removed with hydrofluoric acid in order to use the SEM to
inspect the die itself while powered.
I can see
electricity hey everyone
here's an experiment I wanted to try for
a while the idea is to put a working
electric circuit into a scanning
electron microscope and then use the
microscope to probe the circuit while
it's operating so one of the cool things
is you can do this with an integrated
circuit that you D capped and there you
can see the actual traces inside the IC
change charge state so let me show you
how I did this
I've been decapping chips for a little
while now first did a video a couple
months ago about it and I use fuming
nitric acid to dissolve away the package
after milling a little pocket in the top
of the chip so for this experiment I
wanted to use a circuit that was
self-contained so I went to the
venerable 555 timer chip and Dee capped
a few of the C Mo's variants of the 5 5
5 and then verify that they were still
working soldered up a little circuit
onto a socket and just put an LED on it
and had it flash very slowly so I wanted
a very long time constants that I could
be sure I was seeing the state change
fit if it flashed too quickly it might
be difficult for me to see the change in
the scanning electron microscope image I
took the LED out of the circuit and
replaced it with just a plain old
resistor and the reason for this is that
the scanning electron microscope uses a
photomultiplier tube to detect the
electron signal and if there's any light
inside the electron microscope chamber
that will very much pollute the signal
so I had to switch to just a plain old
resistor and to make sure that the
circuit is still working I connected a
current meter in series with the voltage
supply so about 8 volts the circuit
oscillates between 10 mil 10 milliamps
and about 2 milliamps
I mounted the circuit with some double
stick tape inside the scanning electron
microscope and then hooked up its power
leads to one of my unused sparkplug
insulators in the in the scope and set
it up with a power supply on the current
meter and verified that the circuit was
still working I should add that I didn't
do anything besides remove the epoxy
packaging from the IC so there's
probably an oxide layer on the top of
the integrated circuit I'll get to that
later I turned on the scope as usual
it's been a while since I've fired it up
and I had a problem with my high vacuum
gauge so even though the hive of the
high vacuum gauge indicated that there
was too much air in the chamber over
time times 10 to the minus 2 tour but I
didn't believe it and press the head
anyway it seemed to work so I'm going to
figure out what happened to my pen
engage I got the scope ready for
inspection turned on everything got all
the proper labels in place the output
from my scanning electron microscope is
than oscilloscope screen so I set that
up and adjusted the contrast and
everything and lo and behold pretty
pretty soon after I got it setup I could
see the contrast in the image changing
in time with the current draw going into
the circuit so I was actually seeing the
electricity flow through the circuit or
at least see the charge difference as
the circuit oscillated but I wasn't
actually seeing the integrated circuit
itself changed what I was actually
seeing as the wires around it and not
even the bond wires I mean just the the
macroscopic wires that I soldered to the
to the chip socket so i zoomed in a bit
on the chip itself and this actually
killed it so after after a few minutes
of zoomed in scanning electron beam on
the chip it eventually stopped working
and it drew about 13 milliamps more than
the 10 it was drawing in its own state
before and if you look closely in the
video you can actually see the wires
sort of twitching a little bit so this
is pretty cool this is actually a
diagnostic technique you don't even
really need an oscilloscope probe you
can actually just look at it with a
scanning electron microscope and see the
charge at are changing so you can see
there is sort of a glitch going on in
there now I haven't done much debugging
to figure out what's going on but
certainly the 5 5 5 is fried from the
electron beam I was keeping it down
below about 3 kilovolts for the
acceleration but even at that is
probably enough to build up enough
charge inside the chip to destroy it so
for my next trick I will try decapping
the chip and then removing the oxide
layer that's on the top with
hydrofluoric acid so this should prevent
a charge from building up in the
insulation on top of the chip this might
explain why I was able to see the charge
chain
in the electrical conductor is near the
chip but not in the IC itself because
there's an insulator over a clear oxide
later all right well I hope you enjoyed
that we have a long ways to go here but
I think we'll pretty soon be able to
decaf a more complicated chip and run it
in the SEM and see what's going on in
the dye in real time all right see you
next time
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